Shershaah movie review: Captain Vikram Batra biopic is gripping as an Army procedural, dips outside conflict zones-Entertainment News , Firstpost

Captain Vikram Batra’s saga is as fresh in the public imagination as if 1999 was yesterday. The memory of this young soldier who died that year fighting the Pakistan Army in Kargil will forever be associated with his pop-culture-referencing victory signal, “Yeh dil maange more” (This heart asks for more), borrowing Pepsi’s iconic advertising slogan. Batra was posthumously awarded India’s highest military honour for war-time valour, the Param Vir Chakra.

Director Vishnu Varadhan — an old hand at Tamil cinema, making his Hindi debut here – and writer Sandeep Shrivastava have chosen to chronicle the late Captain’s remarkable life on screen at a time when India is overrun by elements demanding strident proclamations of patriotism from all Indians including artists. Far from echoing the shrillness some others in Bollywood have supplied in response, Varadhan and Shrivastava have created a film that is unexpectedly restrained despite being set largely on a battlefield.

Restraint in war dramas may seem like an oxymoron at all times, yet in these challenging times, this team has shown that it is possible. Shershaah is proof that you can recount a deadly conflict without Akshay Kumar roaring at a crowd of Pathans, without Sunny Deol bellowing at Pakistanis and without conveniently caricaturing the “dushman” as a marauding mob or cowering buffoons.

Shershaah stars Sidharth Malhotra as Batra, and spans the period from his college days to his death at nearly 25. The title comes from Batra’s codename in Kargil.

The film is at its best when it packages itself as an Army procedural. While it covers Vikram’s off-field learnings from his seniors, strategy sessions and actual combat, the narrative is energetic, exciting and moving without being loud and clichéd.

These are settings that Bollywood would conventionally pack with noise, but sound designer Sohel Sanwari’s work coupled with John Stewart Eduri’s background score are used here in Shershaah to convey tension without bursting our ear drums.

Outside these situations, Shershaah does not fare well. The writing of the Army-civilian equation in Kashmir, for one, skips the widespread hostility and suspicion that characterise the reality. Vikram’s naïvete is understandable – he is, after all, new at the time – but the guileless portrayal of the overall scenario is not.

Since Shershaah is about Batra and not about Kashmir, it is a given, of course, that the film would not explore the state’s politics with the detail of Vishal Bhardwaj’s brilliant Haider, but it could still have been less simplistic.

Fortunately for Shershaah, this portion is too brief to leave a lingering impression. The account of Vikram’s relationship with his ‘fiancée’ Dimple Cheema, though, subtracts substantially from the film’s impact. Despite having cast a talent like Kiara Advani for the role, the director resorts to that tired method routinely adopted by Bollywood to dispense with man-woman romances in men-centric cinema: extended flashbacks that overlay long songs on much of the proceedings. Dimple is better off than most such women, at least she gets to speak and has agency, but the triteness (in the treatment and storyline) kill that sub-plot.

*(Minor spoiler in this paragraph)* The only novelty in their relationship is that Dimple is a Sikh and her father is upset that she is involved with a man from another community, which runs contrary to the pretence that Bollywood and the public discourse in north India have peddled for decades, that all is sunshine and roses between India’s Hindus and Sikhs. *(spoiler alert ends)*

Advani sparkles when Dimple clashes with her Dad. Her character nevertheless comes off as a sidelight and the episodes involving her feel like a different movie marked by a complete break in tone from the rest of the narrative.

How lightly the script takes her is evident from the fact that (Spoiler ahead in this paragraph) it can’t decide whether she was just engaged to Vikram or actually married him; and in the climax, when the Batra family appears not to have bothered to ensure her presence at Vikram’s funeral. The latter is bizarre since they were earlier shown being open to the idea of the two marrying. Dimple runs into the cremation venue at the last minute, only to discover that the pyre is already lit, in a pointless, inexplicable instance of melodrama. (Spoiler alert ends)

Since almost half an hour of Shershaah’s 135 minutes running time is devoted to the rather dully dealt Vikram-Dimple love affair, it pulls the film down.

A pity since Varadhan and Shrivastava are so adept at handling the scenes of conflict, which constitute most of the film, and are also clearly keen to avoid nationalist tropes to a great extent. Even when they stumble through Kashmir, they neither demonise nor canonise the local Muslims. The brief exchanges between Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and his people shown in Shershaah aren’t the standard representations of Pakistanis we see in more formulaic Hindi films, neither demonic masses with kohl-lined eyes nor the patronising “look look, a good Pakistani” variety.

Where pro-establishment Bollywood might have grabbed the opportunity to cosy up to the present BJP government by pedestalising the then Prime Minister, BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Shershaah simply shows a TV news clip of him announcing the declaration of war. It remains purely factual again when recounting what the news media back then told us of how Pakistan refused to accept the bodies of its dead soldiers during the war who were finally laid to rest by the Indian side.

Don’t let me confuse you: Shershaah is, without question, India’s story. My point is that at no point does it summon up the portrait of the ugly evil Pakistani that too many Hindi films have painted over the decades in a bid for cheap popularity. This is no Raazi, consummately pulling off a human tale linking two nations, but even as soldiers from both sides yell abuses at each other in Shershaah’s battle scenes, the storytelling stays focused on presenting them as ordinary men doing their jobs rather than saints or pillars of courage on one side versus satan and cowards on the other.

The VO by Captain Batra’s twin brother (also played by Malhotra) does venture into a romanticisaton of the Army when he says it is every soldier’s dream to go to war at least once (such tosh!), but the audience is brought back to reality almost immediately with a scene in which a group of soldiers, the leading man among them, sit weeping over a slain colleague’s body and discussing their fears. This must rank as one of the most honest scenes ever seen in a mainstream Hindi war film, in sharp contrast to the staple chest-thumping associated with Indian soldiers in Bollywood.

*(Minor spoilers in this paragraph)* Though Shershaah plays footage in the end of the real Vikram Batra telling a news channel during the Kargil confrontation that his men were so charged up “that they were wanting that some more bunkers should have been there and we would have got more chaps”, the film quietly skips that sentence while having Malhotra re-enact the same TV interview. Shershaah seems geared towards defining war as a defence of one’s own people, not an attempt to destroy another. This is never clearer than in that scene and when DoP Kamaljeet Negi’s camera closes in on the feet of Indian soldiers running over ground on which a Pakistani flag has fallen. None of them steps on the flag either accidentally or deliberately, their feet seem to naturally cross over it.

So yeah, when a film defies the current national mood and Bollywood conventions to such an extent, yeh dil maange more from it. Shershaah is not consistently excellent like last year’s Gunjan Saxena, but what it gets right is so darned right.

Vishnu Varadhan could not have found a more suitable mainstream star to join him in memorialising one of India’s favourite war heroes. After 2016’s Kapoor & Sons, here, at last, is a film that challenges the actor in the gorgeous Sidharth Malhotra. The thoughtfulness of Malhotra’s performance in Shershaah is illustrated by his boyish swagger when he hauls his rifle on to his shoulder after finishing off a terrorist as a Lieutenant in his first Army posting, following which his body language matures gradually until he becomes the grown man who hauls himself out of his own heartbreak to deliver a rousing speech that inspires his men to walk the last mile in the Kargil war. Barring his inconsistent accent, there’s depth and breadth in Malhotra’s work here, and in the selection of the entire cast including those playing the smallest roles in Kargil.

Yeh dil wants a world without war, but given the reality that war does happen, yeh dil that maange more from Shershaah is also surprised and moved by the film.

Rating: 2.75 (out of 5 stars)

Shershaah is on Amazon Prime Video